Bing Gains Ground in May

The merry market share dance continued apace in May as all of the three major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) sought to capitalise on the small increases they made in April 2013.

Google, Bing and Yahoo all saw slight gains (around .04% maximum) in April, as the use of minor search engines slipped even further, but it looks like one of these search engines is now going backwards.

The big winner is Bing, who claimed another 0.3% of the UK search market at the expense of the minor search engines and Google. Yahoo’s slow progress also continued, with another almost imperceptible gain, but they still power less than three percent of all searches in the UK.

UK Search Engine Share (May 2013)

Google: 90.36% (down o.19%)

Bing: 5.71% (up 0.29%)

Yahoo: 2.65% (up 0.03%)

Others: 1.28 (down 0.13%)

With almost half of 2013 done, we’re seeing a very clear pattern – that Bing is making slow and steady progress to erode Google’s market share, but is finding it difficult to make serious inroads.

This slow progress is due in part to the fact that to many users, Google is search, and it’ll take some seriously effective marketing and positioning to change that. However, as this week’s deal with Apple shows, Microsoft are being proactive about getting people used to working with Bing. And that can only spell bad news for Google in the long run.